Australasian Leadership Institute Free Articles

I am a former Broker Sales Manager and an Operations Manager who is now working as a leadership coach, consultant and strategist across four key areas:

Leadership of successful teams

Optimisation of mental performance

Leadership psychology

High performing teams

Within these areas, I design, coach and facilitate bespoke leadership development programmes for individuals and teams including managers of all levels, directors, executives, professional athletes and aspiring leaders. My clients include the Delegates of the European Union, The Fred Hollows Foundation in Timor-Leste, the Fiji Sun newspaper, Lakes DHB, Kmart and Foodstuffs.

I am listed by Evan Carmichael as one of the top 100 leadership experts in the world to follow on Twitter.

When I design leadership programmes I draw from my twenty five years of managerial experience across a range of industries in the United Kingdom and here in New Zealand. I am accepted in the MBTI suite of tools and I am a professional member of NZAPT (New Zealand Association of Psychological Type) NZIM (New Zealand Institute of Management) and NZATD (New Zealand Association of Training & Development). I am a published author of two leadership books and I've had articles published in a range of magazines including Lifestyle for Men Magazine, M2, New Zealand Management Magazine as well as having a weekly business column with the Fiji Sun Newspaper. I am the current editor of Elite Leadership magazine.

If you want practical effective coaching and facilitation based on a foundation of modern leadership theories then get in touch via Twitter, the enquiry form below or call me direct on 021 354 831 (New Zealand)

I've noticed a strange trend in the business world. It seems that when a company has an employee that is a high performer and is getting through a large amount of work, the only way the company knows how to reward them is by giving them more work. Usually more difficult and challenging work too. Yet across the office is most likely sitting a co-worker who is struggling and not performing so well and what typically happens to that individual is they have work taken away from them.

When you hear the word Coach you most likely think of someone in sport. Maybe someone like Ben Ryan perhaps, who guided the Fijian sevens team to Olympic Gold or Steve Hansen, the current Coach of the All Blacks. Both people who are regarded as World-Class coaches who have developed their players and achieved high levels of success. Now the business world is taking these valuable lessons from the world of sports and bringing these coaching skills into the workplace.

The sales team is the life blood of any business. They are like the wingers of a rugby team. No matter how much work you do around the park, you need your wingers to take the ball across the try line to get the points on the board. Sales is important, yet I'm always astonished at how many companies make the same fundamental mistake and this mistake is costing companies a lot of money in lost sales.

I coach several people who are highly successful in their respective fields so I was asked the team what they thought was the most important question that anyone who wants to be successful needs to ask themselves. To be highly successful then each and every day, one needs to ask oneself the question what have I done today to become better than I was yesterday

A leader who is unable to deliver an effective presentation is unable to express their ideas in a way that inspires people to act. For me a presentation is whenever you have a specific amount of time to communicate with people in order to achieve a specific result. This can be a meeting with your team to address undesirable behaviours, a sales pitch to clients or delivering a proposal to your boss. Presentation skills are highly desired by Leaders yet very few actually develop them yet it's a skill and like all skills it can be learnt and developed and here in this article are some practical tips for all leaders to develop their presentation skills.

In the sports world, it's the All Blacks, the most successful sports team in history. In the business world it's Netflix, the streaming entertainment company who went from the brink of bankruptcy to becoming a $60 billion global giant. Wherever you look there is always one team that stands above the others, the team that is world-class. It's these type of teams that every leader aspires to replicate within their own team, yet many fail to achieve this lofty goal.

Recruitment is the most important job for any organisation. The probability of a leader achieving success can be greatly influenced by the quality of the people following them. I've worked with many teams who have good employees and a weak leader and have still achieved success yet I can't think of a successful team I have met who have a quality leader but poor employees. If you want success recruit the right people.

It's an all too common scenario. A leader asking their team to do something only to find out later they have to follow up because it wasn't done. Teams not following the instructions of their leader is so common in businesses that in many places it's just accepted when with just an application of a technique that I've designed this can easily be resolved.

In this article I want to show you a technique that I've used personally with my own teams and I've also helped introduce with clients to improve the effectiveness of their team and that is Red Team Thinking. This technique is used to improve communication within a team, encourages proactive thinking and produces a more robust and effective decision making process.

One of the many perks of my job as a Leadership Coach is that the more I teach the more I learn. When I visit companies around the world to deliver leadership training it gives me an opportunity to spend time with a multitude of successful business people, many of whom have achieved the remarkable feat of turning an idea into a real successful business.

It's one of the most common phrases in business "I didn't have enough time." The intention was pure and you wanted to complete the task but if only there was a few more hours in the day. Time management is one of the key barriers to success and the ability to manage your time efficiently in a way that allows you to compete more tasks can the difference between you and your competitor. So how can you find more hours in a day? Well! here are a few tips.

Leaders struggle to receive equality feedback so as a result struggle to develop yet this is not the same in other roles within an organisation. When you start in an organisation you will make mistakes, its natural and it's even expected because you are new. As a new employee you are made well aware of your mistakes and what can be done better, in fact it's difficult to avoid such feedback.

No matter the quality of your idea or the scope of your career aspirations one of the most significant challenges in achieving anything in business is obtaining the approval of your Boss. This is the person who can influence how you are perceived by the organisation you are working for and by other prospective employers. Your boss is a very important person and in order to succeed you need to be able to manage this relationship and find a way to get your Boss to say yes. This article will give you some suggestions on how to do just that.

They are the leaders that leave an impression, they inspire, they motivate and people follow them not because they have to but because they want to and people go above and beyond what is required in order to support them. They are the charismatic leaders, often people have said that you are either born with charisma or you or not. Yet many charismatic leaders have learnt what I'm about to tell you and that is charisma can be learnt and you too can become a charismatic leader. You just need to know how.

An iceberg is one of natures great wonders, a large piece of freshwater ice floating freely in water. An iceberg is beautiful and dangerous in equal measure yet what you see of an iceberg is just a fraction of what is going on, with typically 91% of an iceberg being submerged underwater. When I think of an iceberg it reminds me a lot of the challenges facing a leader.

Since his first appearance in June 1938 Superman has been one of fictions most iconic characters. The story of Superman is an inspirational one and contains many useful lessons which can help us become better leaders in our own lives.

The leader of a team is not necessarily the person who has been given the title of leader. Within every team there is the official leader and the hidden or unofficial leader and both play very important roles in influencing the team in subtly different ways. Every team has a Supervisor or a Manager, a person who has been formally appointed as the leader of the team. This formal leader has the responsibility for the team and has the power to assign duties and reward good performance as well as punishing poor behaviour. This is our traditional view of a team's leader yet if we have a closer look at every team, we see another leader, one that wasn't officially appointed as such and may not even be aware that they are a leader. Sounds familiar? So who is this hidden leader?

When I delivered a leadership workshop recently I was asked the question "What was the best demonstration of leadership you have ever seen in person?" My answer surprised some people because it's not from the world of business or politics, for me the best demonstration of leadership was at the Final of the 2011 Rugby World Cup when Richie McCaw the Captain of the All Blacks led his side to victory over France.

More than any other time when things are bad we turn to our leaders. A workplace can be stressful in normal circumstances but when obstacles seem to be too big for the team to overcome and the future is uncertain stress levels rise and this impacts the productivity of the team. It could be a change process, a downturn in sales or a sudden departure of key staff. Whatever the reason, when we are uncertain we need direction and we seek that direction from our leaders. While these times of high pressure can be difficult for staff they can be even more challenging for our leaders who have to provide the much needed direction, so how can a leader effectively lead during bad times?

Here is the typical scenario. You start work at a new job and on the first day you are given a manual or a collection of booklets and within that collection is a code of conduct. This manual contains complex rules of what you can and can't do within the workplace, what you can claim as expenses and what you can't and the potential consequences of breaking these rules.